Frankie felt abandoned.
“Buck up, McGrath,” she said aloud. Reaching for the door to her hooch, she stepped up the single step and entered a dark, musty, buggy room, about fifteen feet by thirty feet, that was divided into three separate cubicle-like spaces, each with its own green canvas-and-metal cot, a makeshift bedside table, and a lamp. Olive-green netting hung in swoops over the ugly plywood walls. Above one cot, color photographs were tacked to the wall: a couple, standing in front of a red horse barn, a man with close-cropped hair, leaning against the hood of a Chevrolet truck, that same man standing between a little red-haired girl and a huge black horse. Above the other cot were posters of Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali and Martin Luther King, Jr. The third cot—hers, presumably—had nothing tacked onto the wall, but the plywood was full of tack holes and torn bits of paper from posters that had been put up and ripped down. Her duffel bag was on the floor.
There was a small fridge in one corner, and someone had built a bookcase out of old slats and filled the shelves with worn paperbacks. It was stiflingly hot and there was neither a fan nor a window. A layer of red dirt coated the floor.
Closing the door behind her, she sat down on the narrow cot and opened her overnight bag. A brand-new Polaroid camera lay on top of the carefully wrapped stack of framed photographs she’d brought from home. She reached for the top one, unwrapped it, held it on her lap. The picture had been taken at Disneyland. In it, Frankie and Finley stood in front of Sleeping Beauty Castle, holding hands. A split second before the camera lens clicked, Finley had grabbed the ticket booklet from Mom and ripped out the E tickets, saying, Me and Frankie are goin’ straight to the Rocket to the Moon. And then to the Submarine. And Mom had said quietly, I hope they serve drinks at one of those kiosks, Connor.
Frankie felt the sting of tears. There was no one here to see, or to care, so she didn’t bother dashing them away. She stared at the image of her brother, with his protruding teeth and spit-shined hair and freckled face, and thought: What have I done?
Next, she unwrapped a picture of her parents, taken at one of their famous Fourth of July parties, both of them smiling, a table draped in patriotic bunting behind them.
They had been right. She had no business being so far away from home—at war—without Finley. How would she last a year?
At that, her stomach roiled again.
She ran for the latrines.
Five
Hours later, Frankie was still lying on her cot, trying not to cry or vomit, wishing she’d never joined the Army, when the door to the hooch banged open. In walked a pair of women in blood-splattered clothes: a Black woman with closely cropped hair who wore shorts, a T-shirt, and combat boots, and a tall, Olive Oyl–thin redhead in stained fatigues. Frankie figured they were both older than she was, but not by much.
“Look at that, Babs. New blood,” Olive Oyl said, unbuttoning her olive-green blouse, tossing it aside.
There was blood on the woman’s bra. She walked forward, clomping her boots, unconcerned about her state of undress. “I’m Ethel Flint from Virginia. ER nurse.” She reached for Frankie’s hand, shook it aggressively, like cocking a rifle. “This here is Barb Johnson, surgical nurse, from some one-stoplight town in Georgia. She’s mean as a dang snake. She made the last girl cry on a regular basis.”
“That isn’t true, Ethel, and you know it,” the Black woman said, pulling the damp T-shirt away from her chest. “Good God, it’s hot.”
Frankie stared at Barb. Honestly, she didn’t know many Black people. Something about the way Barb stared back, her eyes narrowed and assessing, made Frankie feel like a kid who’d wandered into the wrong classroom.
“I’m Frankie McGrath,” she said. Her voice gave out halfway through the introduction and she had to start over.
“Well, Frankie, ditch the uniform,” Ethel said, stripping off her bra and putting on a V-necked olive-drab T-shirt that revealed the silver beaded chain of dog tags around her neck. “There’s a turtle party in your honor—”
Barb snorted. “Hardly, Ethel. Don’t give the kid a false impression.”
“Well, maybe that’s a bit of a stretch, but we have two turtles in today and one guy going home.”
“What’s a turtle?” Frankie asked.
“You are, kid,” Ethel said, sounding old and tired and worn-out. “Now move your behind. I’m thirsty as hell. It’s been a long day, and I surely could use a Coca-Cola.”
Frankie wasn’t used to stripping in front of strangers, but she didn’t want her roommates to think she was a prude, so she began to undress.
It wasn’t until she was down to her undergarments that she realized she had nothing in her duffel or overnight bag to put on except her crisply folded, new green fatigues, which she’d been told to wear for work, or her pajamas, or a pale blue summer dress that her mother had convinced her would be perfect for her days off, or her white nurse uniform.
“A girdle,” Ethel said with a sigh. She opened a drawer and rifled through it, pulling out a pair of cutoff shorts and an Army T-shirt, and tossed them to Frankie. “Don’t worry, it’s not just you. They don’t tell us the truth about what to wear over here.”
“Or anything else,” Barb said.
Frankie peeled off the girdle and rolled down her cinnamon-hued stockings. She stood there for a second, feeling her roommates’ scrutiny, then quickly put on the borrowed clothes. The T-shirt was huge and hung to the top of her thighs, almost covering the cutoff jean shorts once Frankie rolled over the waistband to make them fit.
Opening her duffel, she found her flak jacket and Army-issued steel pot helmet and slipped into the sleeveless jacket, immediately felt its weight. The helmet fell down and covered her eyes.
“It’s a party,” Barb said. “Not a John Wayne movie. Take that shit off.”
“But—” Frankie turned too fast; the helmet clanked hard onto the bridge of her nose, hurt. “Regulations state—”
Barb walked out of the hooch. The door banged shut behind her.
Ethel gently took Frankie’s helmet off, tossed it on the bed. “Look, I know today is a lot. We will help you fit in, I promise. But not now, okay? And as for the flak jacket, just no, okay?”
Frankie undid the flak jacket and tossed it aside. It landed on the helmet on her cot. She felt exposed and ridiculous in an oversized T-shirt that hid her shorts and showed her bare legs and shiny, brand-new combat boots that she’d polished obsessively. Why hadn’t she packed sneakers? Had the men who wrote the “What to Bring” section of the information packet even been to Vietnam? She’d had her hair cut in a Twiggy-inspired pixie for her tour, and now, after thirty-eight hours of travel and this hellish humidity, God knew she must look like she was wearing a black swim cap. Or like she was twelve years old.
Ethel walked fast, talking as she went. “Welcome to the Thirty-Sixth, Frank. Can I call you Frank? This is technically a mobile hospital, but we haven’t gone anywhere in a while; instead, we keep getting bigger. We have several doctors and four surgeons—you’ll know them instantly. They think they’re gods. There are nine of us women nurses and a couple of male nurses and lots of medics. In most wards, the hours are oh-seven-hundred to nineteen hundred hours, six days a week, but we are short-staffed right now, so really, we go until the last casualty is taken care of. If it sounds like a lot, it is, but you’ll get used to it. Hurry up. You’re lagging.”